Using Video to Enhance and Expand Your Channel Marketing Program

Channel Marketing is a unique challenge.

Unlike more traditional B-to-B or B-to-C marketing initiatives, your channel marketing program has a very specific audience — the members of your channel. It’s an audience that’s often intentionally geographically dispersed to limit competitive overlap. And for some businesses, it’s an audience that’s playing all sides of the market, even selling your competitors’ products alongside your own.

But whether your channel is comprised of resellers, brokers, agents, franchisees, or any other model, perhaps the greatest challenge presented to channel marketers is this:

How to make sure your channel partners are prepared to be the experts when talking to your end customer — even when they have extremely limited time and resources to devote to your specific messages.

Historically the solution to this channel challenge has been in-person meetings with partners or documents posted to a shared partner resource site.

Yet face-to-face meetings are becoming more difficult to sustain in today’s business climate, for two reasons:

More organizations are moving to agile product development, requiring more product update communications than ever before

Many organizations build channel partnerships as a more cost-effective means of scaling a sales organization, and are continually adding new partners

All those extra updates and extra relationships make for extra travel and events expenses for in-person communications — and those costs add up quickly.

Traditional marketing isn’t the answer either. As channel marketers adapt to the challenge of maintaining communications with channel partners, traditional communications tools are often little help in spreading a message.

Already burdened with the task of running their own businesses, your channel partners are often too distracted to see traditional emails or flyers.

More engaging messages delivered through customer-facing explainer videos and advertisements may be more compelling, but they don’t provide the deep insights and competitive advantages that channel partners need to effectively message your product.

Channel Marketers need a better tool — Video

As anyone involved in a channel marketing program knows, your partners’ attention is a limited resource. When you have the opportunity to share your message, it needs to be made strong, it needs to be made accessible, and it needs to be made crystal clear.

Video is the tool that can help you deliver all of that, in every message. With video, channel marketing teams can:

Amplify Your MessagesShort of face-to-face communication, video is the most compelling way to share a message or an idea. Including video even in simple messages to your partners gives you the opportunity to show feature demonstrations, share answers to FAQs, and include personal video of yourself presenting — all of which are proven means to make your message more engaging.

Video can also be a strong “to-and-through” communications tool. Unlike traditional marketing videos that don’t often offer much value for partners to reshare, video tutorials, how-tos, and demonstrations are incredibly easy for channel marketers to create — and incredibly valuable for partners to reshare to their own customers.

Expand Your Reach
As channel marketers seek to make personal connections with their limited audience, webinars have become a popular tool of choice. Yet, according to Adobe, schedule conflicts, technical difficulties with web conferencing software, and a myriad of other challenges mean that most of the people who registered to attend your webinar will end up watching the content as an on-demand recorded video, after the live event has come and gone.

Webcasting your webinars solves that — helping you can scale your webinars to more potential attendees, both live and later on-demand. Webcasting doesn’t limit your maximum number of attendees like web conferencing tool do — with webcasting, you can stream to your webinar to thousands — or even tens of thousands — of people.

And unlike the limited recording options available on most conferencing tools, a webcasting tool like Panopto can make your recorded webinar video available online to share within minutes — so the 55% of your audience that can’t make the live event can still see what you had to say.

Make Your Program Easier Than Your Competition’s
Whether they mean to or not, virtually every partner in virtually every channel ends up playing favorites — selling the same product first, over and over again. And for most, the reason for that favorite isn’t necessarily because the product is so outstandingly better or cheaper — it’s because it’s a good product that’s just easier to sell.

Being easier to work with than your competition includes every part of doing business, from your transaction terms, to your ecommerce system, and even down to how easy you make it to find specific answers to specific questions. And here too, the right kind of video can help.

For all too many industries, the complex details of how businesses, products, and services work are stowed away in dense manuals. Video can make these answers easier to understand — but only if they can be fully searched.

Fortunately, modern video platforms are making it easier than ever to build and centralize a library of business video content, and to keyword search it for actual content. Today Panopto customers can control access for their channel partners to search inside any video in their Panopto library — whether or not it was created with Panopto — and instantly find and fast-forward to any keyword spoken in the recording, and any keyword that appears on-screen.

Video does all that. Panopto does it best.
For channel marketing, Panopto is a complete video platform that provides a single, scalable solution to record, search, and share your organization’s video.